Spokane telecommunications entrepreneur Greg Green says he has been fired by OrbitCom, just a few months after becoming its CEO, and plans to sue the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based provider of local and long-distance telephone services.


I wrote a $2 million cashiers check to acquire a 13.5 percent interest in OrbitCom shortly after it purchased the assets of Spokane-based OneEighty Networks Inc., says Green, who had been the latter companys top executive and majority owner. Were going to start legal action to get that back. The courts will have to sort it out, unfortunately.


He says OrbitComs two majority owners, Brad VanLeur and Michael Powers, flew into Spokane over the Easter weekend and terminated him and his executive assistant, Janice Hoover. Former Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Perry, who won the American League Cy Young Award in 1970 and is best known for his 10 seasons with the Minnesota Twins, also is part owner of OrbitCom, but didnt accompany Van Leur and Powers on the trip here, he says.


They didnt give me any reason for the termination, other than to say that they wanted to go in a different direction, Green says. Quite frankly, we hadnt even started the direction, he says.


VanLeur, OrbitComs president, declines to discuss the firings or the $2 million that Green says he is owed, but says he doesnt expect the matter to affect OneEighty Networks operations here. He says Jerry Heggstead, who recently had been hired to serve as finance director at OneEighty Networks, has been promoted to manager and likely will be named CEO.


OneEighty Networks, founded in 2002, said in November that its assets were being purchased by OrbitCom and that Green would become OrbitComs CEO. It said in a news release that the transaction would create a combined entity with annual revenues of just under $20 million and positive cash flow from its 14,000 voice access lines and 8,000 broadband and other Internet customers in 14 states.


OrbitCom had been mostly a reseller of phone services, with few network assets, whereas OneEighty had the extensive facilities-based network backbone to accommodate a broader group of customers, which was why it was such a good fit for us, Green told the Journal earlier this year.


The $5.2 million transaction was controversial, though, because OneEighty Networks was on the verge of insolvency at the timewith its debts exceeding its assetsand had to use the proceeds from the sale to pay off debts, including a large sum that Green said he had infused into the business. That left other shareholdersincluding company co-founder and former president Chad Skidmorewith nothing, causing several of them to question the deal publicly.


Green defends his actions, claiming that he owned 80 percent of the companymeaning he suffered greater shareholder losses than anyoneand that just three of 38 shareholders criticized the way the transaction was handled. He says he lost a $250,000 equity investment in the business as one of its shareholders and, as the last creditor to be paid, got back just $2.15 million of $2.7 million in additional capital he poured into the enterprise.


The public attacks, he says, nevertheless caused him a lot of anguish and soul searching and made last year one of the most challenging of his career.


At the end of the day, you just have to do things in an ethical fashion, he says, adding that he believes he did so.


OneEighty, now operating as a division of OrbitCom, provides telephone, Internet access, Web-hosting, and other services to customers in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. It employs 15 people at its downtown offices, in the Levy Block Building at 118 N. Stevens, and about 30 overall.


Since becoming CEO of OrbitCom, Green had been continuing to work from his downtown office, staying in touch with the companys other owners electronically while beginning the process of integrating the two companies financial data and billing systems.


Although he owns the 10,000-square-foot building on Stevens, he moved out of his office there after being fired by OrbitCom and now is working partly from an office in his Liberty Lake home, handling other business interests in which he still is involved through a company he owns called greggreen.com.


Green says also that he already is being contacted by executive headhunters and is exploring potential employment opportunities with a number of publicly traded companies. Were going to entertain some offers, and see what comes, he says.


He says, though, that because of his love for this area and his other business interests here, he wont sell his home at Liberty Lake and wouldnt leave the Spokane area permanently.


Along with the Levy Block, he owns the three-story, 4,800-square-foot Woodward Building, at 117 N. Howard downtown, where tenants include Soulful Soups and the Human Potential Project.


Also, he is an investor in WIN Partners LLC, an angel fund here that has provided capital to companies such as Blue Water Technologies Inc., Isothermal Systems Research Inc., NextSentry Corp., Purcell Systems Inc., and GenPrime Inc.


Additionally, through greggreen.com, he publishes a magazine here called Inland Business Catalyst, and his company announced last week that it has acquired Vivo Publications Group Inc., of Spokane, which publishes Building and Prime magazines here. Those monthly magazines serve the local real-estate and baby-boomer and senior lifestyle markets.


Green has an extensive telecommunications background in the Northwest, having formed Tel-West Communications Inc. here in 1984 and later served as president of Nextlink Washington and as CEO of Avista Communications, in addition to the OneEighty venture.


Separately, he founded the Greg Green Foundation, which he estimates donates $25,000 to $35,000 a year to support underprivileged children, local arts, the environment, economic growth, health-care research, and human rights.


Green, 44, says he learned a day after being fired that he has skin cancer on his abdomen, and expects to find out soon the depth of the cancer and whether hell require treatment.


Its pretty traumatic for the whole family, and it has caused him to ponder his own mortality, he says, but talking generally of his love for business ventures, he says, I expect to be doing this for another 30 years.


Contact Kim Crompton at (509) 344-1263 or via e-mail at kimc@spokanejournal.com.